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Sunday, August 6, 2017

A month ago, I became an aunt to an adorable and winsome boy named Rishi. Around the same time, people started telling me about the book When Dimple Met Rishi, and I thought I would read the book and then maybe give it to my sister to read and imagine a fun future for her child.

When Dimple Met Rishi is about two Indian-American kids who go to an app development summer camp the summer between high school and college. Rishi and Dimple's parents are friends and want their children to meet and get married. Rishi is totally on-board with this, and he goes to Insomnia-con just to meet Dimple and propose (with his grandmother's ring, no less). Dimple has no idea; she's at Insomnia-con to develop an app to help people deal with diabetes. They meet, Rishi basically proposes, and Dimple freaks out. But then they get to know each other, and Dimple realizes that he's not all bad.

In general, I veer away from young adult romance because I find it too angsty and dramatic. I would never want to return to the period of my life when I was an overly-dramatic teenager, and it is hard for me to read books centered on characters at that age without rolling my eyes multiple times.

But I also grew up Indian-American, and I love that this book exists. There's an Indian girl on the cover, there are Hindi words in the text, there are Indian narrators on the audiobook (who pronounce all the names and words correctly!!!). All of these things are so great. It is like the YA romance version of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix special. I also appreciate that in this book, it's Dimple who is ambitious and driven and totally into being a techie, with big dreams on how to make it happen. And that Rishi loves art but feels like he needs to go to engineering school to make his parents happy.

Much about this book rings true, as someone who grew up here to Indian parents. One of my favorite parts, a tiny detail, was when Rishi explained to Dimple's friend that he speaks Hindi, but that he speaks a version of Hindi that is from Mumbai, where locals speak Marathi. And his parents went to Mumbai from elsewhere, as did many other people, and so the Hindi they speak is not often understood outside of Mumbai. This is so 100% true. My parents grew up in Bangalore, which is a Kannada-speaking city. But their families are both originally from Andhra, which is Telugu-speaking. But so many people from Andhra go to Bangalore that the version of Telugu they all speak is completely different than the Telugu spoken in Andhra. It's a small detail, but many Indian people live through it, and I loved that it somehow made its way into this book.

I also appreciate that the author, Sandhya Menon, made cultural pride and knowledge such a positive thing in this book. Rishi in particular is very well-versed in his heritage and has no embarrassment at all about fully embracing it. I think that is a really great lesson.

But there were also many things in this book that bothered me. Putting aside my general annoyance with young adult romance (and this book had many of those same tropes and bothers), there were things that just were too much for me. Granted, I am 100% sure that I would notice these and judge these more as an Indian than probably other people would. But they still grated.

For example, Rishi. He's this really perfect guy. He's extremely rich and goes to private school with other rich kids, but somehow he's not spoiled or bratty or entitled, even though all the other rich kids in this book totally are. This is never explained. Also, he is really smart and funny and kind. And he is an AMAZING artist who tells his dad that his "brain just doesn't work the same way" as an engineer's brain does. But... he somehow managed to get accepted to MIT, anyway, and is going there to major in computer engineering. Because THAT's an easy thing to just swing. Also, as a 17-year-old, he just shows up somewhere with his grandmother's engagement ring to propose marriage to a complete stranger and this strains credulity to me.

Also, Rishi had this whole encounter with this other Indian guy, Hari, that annoyed me. Hari was a jerk in the book, but there was one point when Rishi asked him where his parents were from (meaning, where in India) and Hari very pointedly said that his parents were born in the US. And then Rishi somehow "won" this competition by talking about how he was so happy and proud to go back to his family's home in India and really connect with his culture and background. This seemed to imply that somehow Hari was less Indian or less whatever than Rishi. This really bothered me because, personally, I despise when people ask me where I am from and then act as though my answer ("Chicago") is incorrect, as though they assume I am from somewhere else just because I am Indian. I realize that this question is different when asked by one Indian to another, but I completely understood Hari's anger in the situation, and I found Rishi's "I love my heritage and go to India all the time" holier-than-thou attitude pretty grating in that instance.

And then there's Dimple's relationship with her parents. Apparently, Dimple's mom wants her to wear Indian clothes all the time, even at school. (And Dimple does this, as there are multiple comments on her kurtas and odnis). And her mom wants her to wear a bunch of make-up and get married stat. Whereas Dimple wants to wear her glasses, no make-up, and focus on school. This part just never really rang true to me because it seemed like the author really wanted to set up this weird misunderstanding/antagonistic relationship between Dimple and her mom, but it was hard to believe in (as an adult, anyway) because her mom didn't come off that way at all, really, when you encountered her in the story. Maybe that's the way an adult would read the story, though, whereas a teenager would read it quite differently than I do :-)

The other thing about this book that just was off to me was the relationship between Rishi's brother, Ashish, and Dimple's friend, Celia. It felt like a waste of time and space to me, and I don't really think it needed to be included at all. Especially as I felt like the book dragged a bit at times with the plotting, and getting rid of that would have made it a bit tighter.

I think what frustrated me most was that it didn't quite rise as high above the Indian stereotypes as I would have liked. You still have two really good kids who do not rebel much at all against their parents. They both somehow get into Stanford and MIT (because God forbid they go to a place like UC-Berkeley or something). They watch Bollywood movies and, conveniently, perform in a talent show with a Bollywood dance number. And their parents want to arrange marriage for them at 18. Honestly, I'm surprised there wasn't a mention that Rishi had won the Scripps spelling bee as a child.

But! This book exists, and it is so proudly Indian-American, and it owns that culture, and I love that. I'm so glad that Dimple was going after her coding dreams and that Rishi had a great love for art, but I wish that it could have gone a bit further.

Monday, July 31, 2017

I have read and enjoyed a few of Mohsin Hamid's novels on audiobook, and Exit West was no exception. The spare, sparse writing style that somehow builds to create beautiful, moving stories is present once more. Exit West is a novel about refugees and the impact of global migration on both the individuals and the world at large, and it's absolutely excellent.

Saeed and Nadia meet in an unnamed city, in an unnamed country. They become friends and fall in love, slowly and then hurriedly, as war overtakes their lives. They escape to Mykonos, and then to London, and then to San Francisco, through magical doorways that open up to people who can pay the price of entry.

Some people may be upset that Hamid reduces the entire exhausting, painful journey from a country in crisis to a country of refuge to the simple act of stepping through a doorway. After all, the decision to leave home is difficult, and then the trip from one place to another is often dangerous and horrible. But Hamid is not as interested in the process of becoming a refugee as on the impacts of being a refugee, or the impact of living in a world in which huge numbers of people migrate based on crises. Thus, Saeed and Nadia step over an edge and escape the physicality of their city, but they don't escape much else.

Exit West is an obviously timely novel in that it is about refugees. But timeliness in a story doesn't really matter if it doesn't stick; and in a story about refugees, it doesn't stick if it doesn't haunt you. I don't know if haunt is even the right word, but it is very difficult to read this novel without being just as consumed by the "what ifs?" as the characters are. What if I had never left? What if I brought my father with me? What if I had never met the person I escaped with? What if we escaped somewhere else? What would my life be like if war had never happened? What would I be like if war had never happened? It's impossible to know and equally impossible not to speculate.

Nadia is a confident, independent woman who adopts Saeed's family as her own and then has trouble removing herself from it. Saeed is an introspective, kind man who turns more and more to religion as he loses control of the trajectory of his life. They begin the story with so much promise and love and kindness for each other, but the stress of their lives causes both of them to draw back and recede from the other, to seek out friendship and understanding from others.

But there are other ways that people are impacted by the refugee crisis, and Hamid gives us brief snapshots of these lives before pulling away again. We see two old men fall in love over a piece of art. We see a man remake his life after contemplating suicide. We see, terrifyingly, a man follow two young women down the street as he strokes the knife in his pocket.

Exit West shows us how global migration can result in changes both profound and minimal to individuals, societies, and geographies. I loved how personal this story felt, from both Saeed's and Nadia's perspectives, and yet how easy it was to see just how much crises in completely foreign places can change people's behaviors here and everywhere. Definitely a book to read when you want to remind yourself of how important it is to remember that people are individuals, not statistics.

Monday, July 24, 2017

Here, she said, taste it. It is the star that took us from our homes and put us on this ship. It is the planet that rules our destiny.
- Deeti, describing a poppy seed

I have had Amitav Ghosh' Sea of Poppies on my radar since it was published. It's the first book in a trilogy centered on a ship, the Ibis. In the first book, the Ibis is transitioning from its previous life as a slave transporting vessel to one that transports coolies and opium. It begins its journey on the Ganges River in India, and then sets out on an ocean voyage with an amazingly rich cast of characters on board.

I loved this book. I am in absolute awe at the breadth and depth that is encompassed within its pages, and I am so excited to read the next two books in the series to see just how much more Ghosh has to share with me. There are some authors who truly astonish me with just how much they can pack into their pages - character development, plot advancement, social commentary, historical accuracy. It's books like this one that make reading a continued delight.

Sea of Poppies is set just at the start of the first Opium War. We don't learn much about the Opium Wars in the west (or at least not in the United States), so it was fascinating to learn more about a period that had such a massive impact on the world (and was a cause of World War I). The British Empire reeeeeeeally wanted China to open up to global trade, but the Chinese did not want to. This angered the British, and thus, Opium Wars. China was forced to cede Hong Kong and open up ports to global trade, and the British got to sell their stuff to more people. They also got access to indentured laborers (coolies) from Asia and South Asia since slavery was no longer an option for them.

Thus, Sea of Poppies is set just as globalization and imperialism really get their groove on, and the scope of this book is absolutely immense because of that. There are Indian farmers who are forced to grow poppies instead of food, and fall into debt. There is a mixed race American man trying to make his way in the world. There are pirates and merchant marines. There's an Indian raja who is humiliated by debt to the English, stripped of his title and wealth, and forced to go abroad as an indentured servant. There are, of course, the English, raking in great wealth and secure in their vision of bringing civilization to India and China. And there's more. The characters in this book are fantastic.

And those characters speak in a gloriously rich variety of languages. Honestly, this is where Ghosh's comedic genius really sparkles. Obviously, a book centered on a former slave ship that now transports opium can have many dark and depressing moments. But the way Ghosh uses language and shows how so many disparate languages can be combined and influence each other is so great. It took me a little while to understand some of the English spellings and mispronunciations of the Hindi words, but once I did, I usually smiled or laughed to myself. They were nice little Easter eggs for people who have some understanding of Indian language. I myself do not know Hindi, but am familiar enough with common words and names to have caught on. It was so well-done, and the book includes a glossary at the back for many of the words, too.

And with all of THAT happening, Ghosh doesn't ever lose sight of telling a fantastic story. Here is a very compelling tale about the wide-ranging impact of colonialism and imperialism, related through extremely personal stories. I loved that we get to know not only about how the Indian ruling class lost so much of its power and prestige to the British, but also get to learn about the farmers who suffered and the enterprising middle-class professionals who cashed out. I was thoroughly engrossed in learning more about how Hinduism was practiced in the 19th century, the obsessions with caste and purity and superstition, and how differently it is practiced today. Ghosh uses India as the setting, but the cast is from everywhere, all doing their best to make their way in a world. Most of the characters are pushing against rules and norms that have dictated their whole lives, whether due to race or caste or income or sex. And yet, they all come together on a ship and those rules are tested. You can see just how huge the social shifts in the 19th century were, all over the world, from societies of rigid class structures based on birth to more malleable ones based on wealth and influence. I loved that, and I loved this book. So excited to read the rest of this series!

Monday, July 17, 2017

Lauren Redniss' Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Falloutis a beautiful book. It is beautiful because of the amazingly subtle artwork that implies more than it compels, because of the process used to create that artwork, because of the typeface the author created herself based on manuscripts she saw at the New York Public Library, because of the archives and research Redniss delved into and included in the book to make it both very informative and intensely personal.

Redniss' book is different than many other graphic novels. It's not structured in panels, but in full page illustrations, sometimes accompanied by dense, descriptive text. It includes many types of artwork, from cyanotype printing (used to achieve a look similar to a radioactive glow), photos, grave rubbings, sketches, and more. There is a Chernobyl Situational Map and photos of mutant flowers. It's absolutely stunning.

Radioactive is described as the story of Marie & Pierre Curie, but that's more of a starting point than the arc of the whole story. Pierre & Marie Curie's partnership was hugely productive, but Marie lived a full life after her husband's untimely death (including earning herself a second Nobel Prize). She raised seriously amazing scientist children and inspired other scientists and changed the world.

She slept with a bottle of lightly glowing radium next to her bed. Her clothes and skin glowed. She had an affair with her husband's former student. She won two Nobel Prizes. During World War I, she made France mobile X-labs. She died a slow, painful death due to radiation exposure, working to the last as she described her "crisis and pus."

Redniss used Marie Curie's life as the centerpoint of her web, but she goes well beyond the lives of the Curies to describe just how much her work has inspired and influenced other people and how much it has impacted the world. Her work helped develop chemotherapy, treatment still used by cancer treatments today. Conversely, it led to significant work on the development of the atomic bomb. Many people in the world became ill or died due to their work with radium; others were inspired by it to study science.

I admit that sometimes this book could be hard for me to follow, and sometimes I had difficulty finding the thread between the Curie storyline and others. But I really, really enjoyed this book. The artwork is stunning, almost hypnotic. Curie's life is fascinating, her work ground-breaking. And it was so inspiring to read about all these truly amazing women.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Sometimes I'll Google phrases like "best diverse comic books" and come across titles I've never heard of, such as this gem by Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do. Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and left the country with her family as a refugee during the war. They eventually made it to the United States, where Bui met her husband and they started a family. While raising her son, Bui reflected upon her relationships with her own parents and how little she knew about their lives before she entered the world. This graphic memoir is her attempt to tell their story and her own, and it's a beautiful one.

As I get older, it becomes more and more clear to me that my parents are human, and that they are humans who age. As I see my friends with their (still quite young) children, I can also see just how exhausting parenthood can be. There are few relationships in life that can remain as inherently selfish and self-absorbed as that of a child towards its parent. Even now, as an adult who is capable of doing adult things like cooking her own dinner and doing her own laundry, every time I go to my parents' house, I regress 100% and expect there to be food waiting for me when I arrive, and food ready for me to take back with me when I leave. I call my dad and complain of medical symptoms so that he will call in prescriptions for me. I call my mom and ask if she'll come over to oversee work on my house so that I don't have to take a day off of work.

Bui reflects upon this as she takes care of her son and compares her childhood to those of her parents' and her son's. Her parents came of age in vastly different circumstances; they met in college, got married, and then their world imploded. They raised children in the midst of war, and then left the country on a boat (while Bui's mother was eight months pregnant) to get to Malaysia. They arrived in America, still chased by their personal demons, and raised a family the best way they knew how. Bui struggled with her relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and only began to understand why when she learned more about their childhoods. The empathy that comes through in the way she describes her family history is so moving, and the title of the book works so well. Her parents weren't perfect, and they made mistakes. But they did the best they could do, and their children grew up with better lives, and their grandchildren grow up with even better ones.

The Best We Could Do is a beautiful story, particularly at this time when so much of the world is turning away refugees. Accepting refugees not only changes the lives of the refugees, but of generations to come. The book is also a truly heartfelt memoir about family and the deep love that you can have for people you don't always understand and who are far from perfect.

Monday, June 26, 2017

I have lived my whole life by the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Michigan. I love the vastness of these waters, like interior freshwater oceans. I grew up visiting the beaches and now walk along the waterfront quite regularly; I live only a mile away from the shore. So as soon as I heard about Dan Egan's book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, I knew I would read it. I don't think I realized just how depressing and stressful the book would be, though. (That said, it ends on a semi-happy note!)

The Great Lakes were a bastion of glorious fresh water and bountiful fish for many, many years. They were difficult to navigate, so they were mostly protected and allowed to grow and thrive as they wanted. And then the St. Lawrence Seaway was built and things have been going downhill since then.

The lakes have been under attack by invasive species constantly since then. The first attack by these really, really scary looking sea lampreys, which are basically blood-sucking eels that came from the Atlantic Ocean and attacked our poor, unsuspecting lake fish. I do not recommend googling images of the sea lamprey because it is not something you'll be able to get out of your head any time soon. It is ghastly and will likely show up in a nightmare.

Luckily, with some great work (that still continues to this day, at a cost), scientists were able to get the sea lamprey population way down by finding a poison that worked on them and only them. BUT THEN, someone came back to Michigan from out west and was like, "What the Great Lakes need are sporting fish, not boring fish!" and so then he imported salmon to the lakes and then brought a bunch of species for those salmon to eat, and AGAIN the native fish populations dwindled. (But recreation on the lakes SOARED into a very lucrative industry.) And people were happy but the lakes were not really a great place. AND THEN came the mussels, the true villains of our story (and the villains of lake stories all over the country, I think). And they ate all the phytoplankton and starved out the salmon and the other fish, and there is NO GETTING RID OF THEM. Really, I heard a Science Friday podcast with Dan Egan and some other scientists recently, and they were basically like, "Hopefully something will come and solve the mussel problem, but it's not likely to be humans." Because there are just trillions of them. If you were to drain the lakes, they would be full of these quagga mussels, cleaning the water and eating all the food and being complete menaces.

Also, asian carp has infested the Chicago River and is likely to already be in Lake Michigan and who knows what will happen then.

Suffice it to say, things do not look great for the Great Lakes. Not only are there the many invasive species, but the lakes are bordered by eight different states, and two countries, and they have all these river tributaries, and people travel from the lakes to other parts of the countries, and the EPA seems to really not care that much about the lakes (to an appalling degree, really), and Chicagoans really want to keep taking from the lakes without giving a lot back, and the fishing industry really wants the salmon back, and other groups really want the trout and perch back, and it is very disheartening to read about. Very important and fascinating, but fairly disheartening. People can understand a forest fire or can see glaciers receding, but they don't care nearly as much about things happening underwater. They don't understand just how different the lakes are now than they were 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. There has been an incalculable loss to the whole world, and we seem not to notice.

Egan goes into excellent detail not only about the many rounds of invasive species in the lakes, but also about the people who depend on the lakes but also hurt them, the many government agencies that seem pretty ineffective in managing the lakes, and the people who are trying valiantly to help the lakes as much as they can. I noted many quotes about the lakes that I was going to share in this post, but they are fairly sad and long, and I don't know if that's the best.

Instead, I'll leave you with the uplifting fact that Egan gave me at the end that made me feel a little better. Native fish species in the lakes may be learning how to eat and digest the evil quagga mussels! They never did before, and they were starving because the mussels ate all their food. But now, since the mussels are so plentiful and the fish food is not at all plentiful, the fish are going after the mussels. This is glorious. I hope this continues and helps put the lakes in a little bit of a better balance. Of course, this could all be of no help if more invasive species come in and wreak havoc on the system, or if we continue to pollute the lakes at the same rate that we do now. But it's a story of resilience and adaptation and rooting for the underdog, and I think that's grand.

If you live by the Great Lakes, or any lake, I highly recommend reading this book! If you enjoy books about environmental impact, or even if they cast you into despair, but you like to feel well-informed, I recommend this book to you, too. I plan to do some research to see how I can help the lakes! If only to go and clean up the beaches sometimes.

And if nothing else, I recommend a listen to the Science Friday podcast I linked to above! It's excellent.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

There are a few times in her book Testosterone Rex in which Cordelia Fine self-deprecatingly talks about how, when she introduces herself to people, she is always saddened by the fact that she is not immediately surrounded by fangirls and fanboys who carry copies of her book around and want her to autograph it right then and there.

I admit that I don't carry Fine's Delusions of Genderaround with me, but I am a HUGE fan of the book, and I'm pretty sure that if I were ever to meet Fine in person, I would be a total fangirl and absolutely ask to take a photo with her and all sorts of other things.

SO NOW YOU KNOW, CORDELIA - you are just meeting the wrong people. You have LOADS of fans who love you and your work.

I was pretty excited to learn that Fine had a new book out, this one about how people assume that testosterone is a hormone that creates vast differences between men and women (besides the private bits), and that it can explain a lot of things about human and animal behavior, from risk-taking to spreading the seed to being successful at work. And, as she does, Fine shoots all of these assumptions down using science.

The book clocks in at less than 200 pages before the footnotes, so it's not long, but there's a LOT packed into its pages. I don't remember this happening at all while I read Delusions of Gender, but I admit that reading all these details about the sex habits of fish and insects was a little trying for me. I didn't love every page of this book the way I loved every page of Delusions of Gender, but I do think the pay-off for this book is really just as good! Just know that I skimmed some parts of it.

Fine makes a lot of great points, and some of them really resonated with me. For example, she talks about risk-taking and how studies have shown that men are more likely to take risks than women are. Then she totally breaks apart this whole thing, and it was amazing. FIRST, she says that when you separate people by ethnicity, it is actually mostly just white men who feel the world is super-safe and therefore are quite willing to take risks. And, within that subset, it was white men who were "well educated, rich, and politically conservative, as well as more trusting of institutions and authorities, and opposed to a "power to the people" view of the world..."

Who would have thought? The people with the most privilege are the ones most likely to take "risks," possibly because they are the least likely to lose.

Fine goes on to state that people view risks very differently, and someone may consider one thing quite risky and something else quite safe. For example, a skydiver could be very conservative with his money, and a Wall Street speculator could drive a Volvo. It's the individual's perception of the risk that is important, not a general idea of what is risky and what is not.

A salient point to bring those two facts together? "When asked about the risks to human health, safety, or prosperity arising from high tax rates for business, now it was the women's and minority men's turn to be sanguine." (Ah, so rich white men were very worried about the risks that would come with taxing business, whereas the people who would more likely benefit from taking that risk were not so worried!) Basically, people of both genders and all races take risks all the time, it is just that we seem to value some actions as being more risky (skydiving) than others (accepting a job at a company where that you will be the only woman, surrounded by bros).

Cordelia Fine is one of those people with so much glorious righteous anger PLUS a fantastic sense of humor that you kind of want her to fight all your battles for you. She shares a story about how she went to a school sale and some woman was selling plastic knives, and made a point to say the girl could have a pink knife, but her brother could have red or blue. She talks about how early kids become aware of gender and what they are "supposed" to do. (She goes into even more detail on this in Delusions of Gender). She reminds us that we should never say stupid phrases like, "Boys will be boys," as though we should give them a free pass for being jerks. She really carries the banner on gender equality, and I love her for it.